Not true at all. I interacted with Meena[1] while I was there, and the publication was almost three years before the release of ChatGPT. It was an unsettling experience, felt very science fiction.
reply[1]: https://research.google/blog/towards-a-conversational-agent-...
The surprise was not that they existed: There were chatbots in Google way before ChatGPT. What surprised them was the demand, despite all the problems the chatbots have. The pig problem with LLMs was not that they could do nothing, but how to turn them into products that made good money. Even people in openAI were surprised about what happened.
replyIn many ways, turning tech into products that are useful, good, and don't make life hell is a more interesting issue of our times than the core research itself. We probably want to avoid the valuing capturing platform problem, as otherwise we'll end up seeing governments using ham fisted tools to punish winners in ways that aren't helpful either
The uptake forced the bigger companies to act. With image diffusion models too - no corporate lawyer would let a big company release a product that allowed the customer to create any image...but when stable diffusion et al started to grow like they did...there was a specific price of not acting...and it was high enough to change boardroom decisions
replyChatGPT really innovated on making the chat not say racist things that the press could report on. Other efforts before this failed for that reason.
replyWell, I must say ChatGPT felt much more stable than Meena when I first tried it. But, as you said, it was a few years before ChatGPT was publicly announced :)
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